"Lucifer Rising"

Brotherly love? Forget it. These siblings, apparently inseparable through four TV seasons, have had a bit of a falling out as the episode opens. Seems Dean’s been signed to a lifetime contract with the angels—the heavenly kind, not the ones in L.A.—and he’s got a little problem with Sam being infected with demon blood. "I’m not even sure if he’s still my brother anymore," he mournfully grunts. "If he ever was."

But while the brothers go their separate ways (for a while at least), both are heaven-bent to forestall the apocalypse. To do so, they have to preserve the last remaining seal that keeps Lucifer penned up in prison—the door to which is located in a convent, the scene of a heinous massacre that took place 27 years earlier.

OK, so none of this is particularly biblical. But we can at least give the show points for grappling with spiritual issues, right? Um, not so much.

While Supernatural’s writers make liberal use of Christianese mythos, they have no intention of giving the show a Christian message. How do I know? In this episode, the angels are nearly as bad as Lucifer’s crew.

When Dean tries to save his brother from triggering the beginning of the end of the world, an archangel named Zachariah stops him. Seems as though the heavenly mindset is one of Let’s Get This Party Started! Zachariah, a smirking CEO type, tells Dean that this isn’t the first "planetary enema we’ve delivered," and he confides that life for Dean afterward will be wonderful—full of peace, happiness and women—"two virgins and 70 sluts." When Dean asks where God is in this "divine" plan, Zachariah says, "God? God has left the building."

Supernatural posits that heaven and hell are two powerful and essentially immoral forces using humanity for their own whims and wiles. So Dean rebels against his angelic overlords, declaring he’d rather choose pain over peace any ol’ day, if the latter involves becoming a mindless "Stepford b‑‑ch in paradise."

Theologically, of course, this is extraordinarily problematic on dozens of levels. Take just Dean’s decision, for example: In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan made essentially the same decision and becomes—well, very literally, goodness’s primary adversary. Which suggests that Supernatural’s writers only plumb the Bible or other religious sources when they want to pirate a cool-sounding name.

I could go on. But there’s really no need. So I’ll end with this: Even if Supernatural was theologically nifty, it’d still have oodles of problems. In the episode’s opening scene, a possessed priest slaughters a sanctuary full of nuns, and we later see their bodies and blood strewn across the sanctified space. Dean kidnaps a terrified nurse (albeit one who is possessed by a demon), and viewers hear her scream in terror from the back of a car before Dean, presumably, kills her (offscreen). The show has its share of sexual double entendres, too, and is loaded with profanity.